[Paleopsych] RSS news feed info

[Thrst4knw at aol.com]

<<<How do you do an RSS feed? I have a UNIX shell account and use Pine for 
e-mail, Lynx for the Web, and trn or tin for the Newsgroups (which I 
rarely visit anymore). I'm not sure how I can get these feeds either.>>>

The author needs a program that builds an XML file and the subscribers need a 
program that reads it, and the location of the files they are interested in, 
which are published on the author's web page and in various directories.

An RSS feed is nothing more than the simplest standardized form of web 
publication scheme, where someone places links and optional descriptions into an XML 
file, and other people read that XML file and display the headlines to see 
which ones they are interesting in following up.  It is best suited to ongoing 
publication of recent changes or articles (news) rather than general file 
transfer.  

It differs from email in that: (1) subscription is trivial rather than 
managed, people just point their reader at the files they are interested in (and 
many web sites have RSS feeds), and (2) you don't send copies to everyone, 
filling up their inbox, you publish links and they pull the articles they are 
interested in.

The real point of it is "aggregation," which means that the readers use 
software that knows the locations of a large number of these XML files, and 
displays a filtered list of just the most recent articles (for example) from each of 
them in one list they can glance at from time to time to keep up with the news 
from multiple places at once.

>From the reader's perspective, it provides a way to keep track of recent 
articles published by your selected sources, where the filtering keeps down the 
total volume.  From an author's perspective, it provides a simple way to push 
new items or new files out to people.  

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Some informational links:  
-------------------------------------

Good intro:
http://rss.softwaregarden.com/aboutrss.html

A.P. Lawrence on RSS feeds on UNIX ...
http://www.aplawrence.com/Basics/rssfeeds.html

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Readers:
--------------

Some good RSS readers (many of them use an "Outlook-like" interface) :  
SharpReader (http://www.sharpreader.net/ ), RSS Bandit ( http://www.rssbandit.org/ 
), 

http://www.pluck.com/  has both a desktop version and a web version.

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Generating your own feeds:
----------------------------------------

Here's a simple free program that I've used.  It runs on Windows, Mac OS X, 
and Linux and is OpenSource ...
http://www.softwaregarden.com/products/listgarden/

One perspective of generating feeds on UNIX ...
http://aplawrence.com/Unix/simplerssfeed.html

I don't have a lot of info on generating feeds on UNIX platforms, but here 
are some details on the Microsoft platform ...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/msdnmag/issues/04/04/XMLFiles/default.aspx

kind regards,

Todd
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